How to Maintain an Effective Real Estate Social Media Strategy

So you’ve built an effective home builder or developer social media strategy, but what’s next? It’s important to remember that creating a plan is merely the first step, and it’s crucial to continue practices that sustain the success of your strategy.

Competition, new platforms and ever-changing trends make persistent assessment and improvement of your home builder or developer social media plan an absolute must-do. Successful social media strategies aren’t permanent, they should always be a constant work in progress that you should be prepared to review, adjust and improve to stay on track.

Social media is a vital marketing asset for both connecting with your audience and promoting your brand, and that means it’s important to focus efforts on implementing a plan that effectively addresses your marketing objectives. Knowing your brand, goals and who you’re trying to reach is critical for creating a real estate brand social media strategy that is engaging and sustainable.

Below, we’ll share social media practices that will help you maintain your home builder or developer social media strategy to consistently achieve successful results.

Set a Framework

Take the time to set realistic, relevant goals for your brand’s social media marketing. As you begin to implement a strategy for your home builder or developer social media presence, it’s essential to reflect. Make sure to have a clear understanding of your brand and what you hope to achieve through your social media channels. Successful social media strategies stem from your goals, and your objectives are informed by your brand values.

No matter what tactics you execute within your social media strategy, it’s important to ensure they always align with your brand values and goals. It’s likely your business has strategic goals set out to guide its trajectory, and your social media marketing strategy should aptly fit into those overarching business goals.

Setting these objectives is a realistic first step toward establishing an efficient and sustainable social media strategy. Are you aiming to boost brand awareness, generate leads, increase engagement, drive traffic to your website? Social media is a great way to accomplish any of these goals, as long as you’re utilizing strategies that effectively facilitate the intended results. Without establishing reasonable targets, it’s often more difficult to scale your social efforts and ultimately produce successful results.

Stick to Your Brand

No matter what content your brand shares on social media to engage its audience, it’s important to stay true to your brand. Many brands fall prey to jumping on the bandwagon in attempt to catch their audience’s attention with any interesting content. Instead, creating focused social media messaging allows you to share content that rings true to your real estate brand identity and resonates with your target audience.

It’s important to always consider how your brand identity aligns with the content you produce. Don’t produce content with the sole focus of capturing results, think of how you can drive engagement and conversations by utilizing your brand character. Businesses that post eclectic content easily become less memorable to their audience, while brands that stick to a defined, recognizable tone along with familiar designs and color schemes offer a more cohesive social media presence and form stronger brand awareness over time.

Create Content Calendars

Maintaining a successful social media strategy for your home builder or developer brand is all about consistent planning. Creating compelling content is one piece of the puzzle, but another is creating a plan for how that content will be shared to generate the intended impact. One of the best steps to organizing your social content is creating a monthly content calendar. Content calendars provide a place for your team to outline every post your brand shares from the copy to the accompanying images and the timing of when it will be shared.

Placing social media posts on a calendar enables you to space out content effectively and assess every piece of content your brand shares to ensure it aligns with the brand identity and voice. It’s important to be intentional about every post your brand produces and ensure all social media activities represent the brand in a meaningful way. Content calendars allow you to do just that and more, making this element an invaluable part of your social media strategy.

Utilize Social Media Management Tools

After creating a content calendar filled with posts meant to effectively engage your audience, it’s essential to make a plan that ensures everything gets posted right on time. The best way to efficiently stick to your content plan is to utilize social media management tools that offer your team the ability to schedule your brand’s social media posts ahead of time.

Using your monthly content calendar, you can go through and promptly set each post to run on schedule. When it comes to managing your business’ marketing plan, there are several aspects to keep up with, but social media management tools allow you to take the tedious task of daily social posting off your plate. This gives you more time to seek out ways to actively engage with your audience on social media and focus on your big-picture marketing goals.

Measure Metrics and KPIs

Achieving great results on social media is often a practice of constant trial-and-error. Sustaining a successful social media strategy requires consistent performance analysis. Receiving the most effective results from your social media strategy requires accurately tracking, measuring and optimizing your efforts. Think back to your goals and assess the relevant performance metrics that align with those objectives. These metrics may include post reach, impressions, content clicks, profile views, likes, shares, follower growth and more depending on your brand strategy. The metrics you measure may need to be different for each social media platform, as the goals for each may differ based on the capabilities of different sites.

Digging into these insights is the best way to understand how much of your content is reaching users and what drives them to engage with your brand. The success of your content is related to the appeal it delivers to your intended target audience. By measuring post performance, home builders and developers can gauge which content types are worth sharing, as well as the content that doesn’t interest their audience. Take a look at your top-performing social media posts and consider ways you can recreate that content to continue achieving strong engagement. On the other hand, it’s also advantageous to examine any content that performed poorly. Use these instances to inform your strategy and make note of what doesn’t appeal to your target audience.

It's beneficial to chart out your social statistics on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to measure out long-term performance and gain insight into the success and downfalls of your strategy. Taking this overarching view of your social media activity will truly help put the effectiveness of your strategy into perspective. How did your brand perform on social media compared to the previous month? How does it compare year-over-year? Not only does taking note allow you to see where there is room for improvement, but it also allows you to celebrate your growth over time.

Conduct Competitor Evaluations

As your brand begins producing social media content, it’s beneficial to always keep an eye on the competition. Taking a simple review of competitors’ social media presences can enable your business to gain fantastic insight into the target audience you share and help you find ways to optimize your own strategy.

Browse their social media channels and then compare their content strategy to your brand’s social media. What do they do well, and what is their top-performing content? What content do they share that doesn’t seem to produce strong engagement? How is their overall engagement compared to that of your brand? Use these answers to draw conclusions about what content ideas appeal to your audience and how you can adapt your strategy accordingly.

The purpose of this practice isn’t to steal ideas but simply to learn more about the types of content that do and don’t work to engage your audience. This will help you learn what your audience expects to see from your business and spot opportunities to grow your content with fresh ideas.

Commit to Trend-Watching

The most successful brands on social media are those that keep up with shifting trends and prove to their followers that they keep up with what’s popular. Keep an eye on emerging social media trends on each platform and make note of common topics that are rising in popularity. When engaging ideas are presented, these are great opportunities to capitalize on popular topics and maximize your engagement.

Before taking part in any trend or contributing to a popular conversation, always ask yourself if each trend can appropriately be incorporated into your brand’s social media strategy. As mentioned above, it’s crucial to put your brand identity first above all else. Does this trend truly align with your brand identity and values, or does it simply seem fun?

Even if you’ve seen other brands participate in a trend, this should not be your only reason for joining in as well. If your brand shares content that doesn’t match your brand identity, you may risk alienating your audience. Maintaining a consistent presentation of your brand is crucial for building credibility and trust among your audience. Use your focused messaging as a standard to measure trending content ideas against.

Sustain Your Real Estate Social Media Strategy

Implementing a successful social media strategy requires a persistent focus on finding ways to improve and adjust. From watching trends to analyzing competitors, creating content calendars, measuring your social media results and more, there are several ways you can actively analyze and optimize your home builder or developer social media performance to achieve fantastic results.

The key to forming an effective social media strategy starts with establishing a compelling brand that drives your content. At Milesbrand, we can help your company create a differentiated real estate brand identity that can help you connect with your target audience through social media. Get started today by reaching out to our team to learn more, or visit our blog for more social media tips for home builders and developers!